Prequel Case Study

The Challenge

Kevel is the ad infrastructure behind some of the world’s most innovative retail media platforms, powering custom ad servers for brands like Chewy, The Home Depot, and PayPal. For enterprise advertisers, access to performance data is mission-critical. Kevel’s clients rely on campaign-level and log-level data to track performance, evaluate ROI, and run advanced analysis in their own internal systems.

Kevel’s Data Shipping feature is designed to meet this demand by exporting log-level ad performance data from their platform to customers’ data warehouses. Initially, this feature supported only one setup: connecting Athena-based storage to Amazon S3 using native AWS tools.

While this worked well for existing customers on AWS, it could not scale to support enterprise prospects using Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure, and other environments. Kevel needed more flexibility without a significant engineering lift.

“A growing number of prospects wanted us to ship data to destinations that we couldn’t support, which meant longer, slower sales cycles,” said Dylan Hulser, VP of Retail Media at Kevel. “We needed to find a better solution, one that would work for any enterprise advertiser, regardless of where they kept their data.”

Kevel explored options like replicating data manually into Snowflake, but none offered the automation, scale, or simplicity the team was looking for. To keep growing its enterprise business, remove sales friction, and streamline onboarding, Kevel needed a future-proof solution that could support any data destination, without rebuilding their own infrastructure.

The Solution

Prequel delivered exactly what Kevel needed: a scalable, low-maintenance solution that made it easy to export log-level ad delivery data to any cloud destination, without engineering overhead or data duplication.

Unlike other vendors who offered piecemeal replication tools, Prequel came to the table with a purpose-built platform that aligned perfectly with Kevel’s philosophy: modern, flexible, and built for scale. Prequel removed the need for Kevel to manage multiple data environments or rearchitect their pipeline, giving Kevel and its customers the freedom to work with data on their own terms.

“Conversations with Prequel were different from other vendors,” Hulser continued. “They built their platform to solve this problem, and their approach really simplified the experience. Prequel solved every problem right out of the box, including the ability to ship data anywhere our customers need it, now or in the future.”

The onboarding process was fast and seamless. Kevel had Prequel live in production in just three weeks, with nearly all of that time spent on internal data model cleanup, not infrastructure changes. Prequel’s team worked closely with Kevel to onboard its first Fortune 500 customer using a self-serve Magic Link, allowing the client to get up and running in minutes with no engineering help required.

“With our previous setup, we would have had to do a lot of engineering work to get the customer up and running,” said Hulser. “With Prequel, it’s a plug-and-play process that works in a matter of minutes.”

This approach not only gave Kevel the flexibility and scalability it needed, but also freed up the team to focus on their core strengths – delivering best-in-class ad serving – while trusting that their data exports would reliably reach any destination their customers required. The ease and speed of implementation helped accelerate Kevel’s onboarding process, reducing time-to-value for their largest clients.

“Prequel was definitely the right decision for us,” Hulser concluded. “From its purpose-built solution to the team, who are incredibly knowledgeable and always on hand to support, it has been fantastic from start to finish.”